


Back and Forth

by Ylevihs



Series: How Not to Fall [45]
Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Discussions of violence, M/M, Spoilers, Time Shift, headcanon heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:28:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23160961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylevihs/pseuds/Ylevihs
Summary: Richard doesn't want herdead
Relationships: Herald/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Series: How Not to Fall [45]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1327892
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	Back and Forth

Two months earlier

-

Dr. Finch had left the windows of her office open. Warmish sunlight filtered in, along with the general sounds of the city. Car horns, shouting. Construction workers. The smells of hot pavement and exhaust.

“I think we’re ready to start discussing your family life, Richard,” she crossed her legs and adjusted the notepad on her knee, balancing it.

Richard allowed the groan out of his mouth without any attempt to censor it. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” she replied, patient and soft. “You’ve been doing a good job of evading questions about them,” a light poke. She had no idea. It left a taste of stale moth balls in his mouth to do it, but he’d been wiping clean any mention of ‘family life’ at the end of each session it dared to surface in. Made her think, and she easily accepted, that he became fidgety and visibly upset at their mention. It wasn’t far from the truth of what actually tended to happen. “Whether we like it or not, the people who raised us will always have an impact on our adult lives,” like reading from a text book. Because she knew he relaxed more, became more open, when there was a degree of separation. That slight separation was erased. “Tell me a little about them, anything you feel comfortable saying,”

Anything he felt comfortable saying? The desire to remain stubbornly silent came and went. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d plucked memories out of her head. Richard resigned himself to feeling slimy for the rest of the day and sighed, leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees.

“It was strict,” he offered up. Not fully a lie, as if it would have made a difference.

“In what ways?” Finch prompted when he remained quiet. He shrugged and her brow furrowed slightly before coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t being deliberate. “Were there things like time schedules you had to keep?” giving an example and preparing her pen to make any notes about what he could offer her.

“Yeah,” Richard snorted hard and debated how he wanted to fit reality into a nicely shaped box. “They didn’t allow any deviation from it. Everything was on the schedule from how long you had to eat to when you were allowed to go to the bathroom,” the pen began moving. Quickly.

“How old were you when your parents first put you on a schedule like that?”

“As soon as they could enforce it,” Finch’s mind placed that as early, during the developmental stages of childhood. Her notes were a bit sloppier in their speed. And then they slowed, the doctor aware that her reactions were being observed.

“Did you have any free time. In the schedules your parents made you follow?”

“No,” he shook his head and fought back another bitter laugh. The idea of free time in the Farm was. Well, it felt absurd. What would he have even done with it? Watched the other Regenes go about their day? Watched the scientists or guards or trainers? Stared at the ceiling and dream of escape. And. Ah, well. Why not say so? “There was nothing I could have done even if they did give me time to myself,” Dr. Finch’s pen paused.

“We are talking about when you were a child?”

“Sure,” sort of. Childhood meant something different when the body you were using wasn’t already going through puberty while your mind was just coming to terms with shapes and the names of colors.

“Most,” Dr. Finch tried to slot that together. Richard caught the edge of needing to reread her chapters on child psychology before their next session. It wasn’t her specialty, after all. “Most children, when left alone, will play. Either with their environment or with imaginary friends. They might draw or come up with songs to occupy themselves,” the unspoken question asked if he did any of those things. Richard obligingly shook his head.

“Even if I’d had time to do anything like that, I don’t think they would have let me,” more. More deliberately slow note taking. “And before you ask, ‘playtime’,” he made air quotations “Was not part of the schedule,”

“What was part of it?” she leaned back in her chair then, a calculated gesture. Showing him that he had the floor. “When you were, let’s say, seven years old?”

“Wake up at six am,” he shrugged. “Brush your teeth, shower, go to the restroom, eat breakfast. Go,” he paused for half a second, smoothly disguised as needing a sip of water. “To class. Study and practice. Dinner, brush your teeth, go to the restroom. Go to sleep at nine at night. Rinse and repeat,” Dr. Finch finished writing a question for next session.

“A pretty full schedule,” meant to be an agreement. “Were you allowed to have friends over?”

“No,” and he could see the questions being loaded like bullets. Rapid fire. All aimed at him.

“Do you feel you had many friends?”

“I wasn’t allowed to have any friends,”

He stopped her before she could continue, picking a select few from the lineup. “We didn’t celebrate holidays. Or birthdays,” her thoughts turned. He followed right along, momentum more than an urge to reveal information driving him. “Punishments were regularly enforced. And no,” one she hadn’t been thinking of, but added a nice sarcastic flair. “Mommy didn’t ever hug me,”

Dr. Finch gave him half A Look that slid into something else. Fitting something in. He couldn’t see where. “Were you being facetious? Or did your parents never hold you as a child?”

The snort finally broke out. “No. God, no,” shaking his head and looking at the ground. Just in time to hear the pen back to its quick scribbling. “Skin to skin contact was grounds for,” a longer pause between the two of them, Dr. Finch’s mind scrambling but needing to let him finish. Forcing herself not to complete the thought for him in case it went somewhere she wasn’t expecting. Somewhere she was dreading. “Nothing good,” he ended lamely. Too close for comfort. Let her scrabble, for a moment. 

His hands twisted over themselves, palms sliding over palms over the backs of his hands. Dr. Finch’s mind offered up a revelation for her own notes. It was an unkind one. Humans, especially children, needed touch. Things didn’t develop correctly when it was denied.

“Were you feel like you were close with either of your parents?” careful treading.

“No. As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t have a father,” which Finch noted as perhaps leading to his resentment towards authority figures. “And I hate my mother. I hated her then, too, but I didn’t know how to articulate it,”

“Did things change as you got older?” For better or worse. Her voice was quieter now. The things she knew about him, that she was allowed to remember about him, were surface level even for a therapist. He was out of the closet. He had trust and self-esteem issues. Alcohol abuse that he allowed her to think was slightly worse than it really was. She knew he struggled with suicidal thoughts from time to time. And she knew he knew Ricardo, a connection she had theories on but had never tacked down for certain. The chance to ask questions about his formative years was a rare one, in her mind.

Richard’s mouth moved without him telling it to. The half lie easy. “I ran away once. When I was a teenager. Spent some time on my own and got to experience…anything outside of their world. Made friends, even. Even though I was terrible at it,” he bit his lower lip, harder than he intended to. “I felt like I. Like I was learning who I was as a person for the first time. And then they found me, and dragged me back,” voice cracking despite his attempts to keep it level. Eyes still trained on the ground by her feet. “And things were a lot worse after that,”

She didn’t ask how, although she wanted to.

She didn’t ask for examples of how he was punished, but her mind was creative enough to offer up plenty of options.

Instead she asked, setting her notepad to her side, “Do you ever have contact with your family now?”

“No. They,” he took in a shuddering breath. One that signaled either he finish up or start crying. “They keep trying to contact me. To find me. They still want me to come back,” he clenched his teeth and couldn’t make himself relax his jaw. “And I refuse to,”

She didn’t say that that may have been for the best, because that wasn’t her professional opinion. Her professional opinion was:

“I think that’s enough for today, Richard. Let me get you another tissue,”

-

Daniel’s hand carried the weight of the world and brought all of it down on Richard’s shoulder.

Every cell in his body urged him forward. She was right there for goodness sake. Vulnerable. Weak. If not for Daniel’s hand, pinning him straight through to the core of the earth, it would have been too easy. To reach out with his hand. Reach out with his mind. And rip her apart, damn the consequences. Who needed revenge when she could be dead? So what if they always claimed it would kill him too? It wouldn’t be worst lie ever told. Certainly not by their standards. And if it was true?

If it was true.

That burying his hands deep into her brain and pulling would kill him too? Would. It would. Would it? Be so terrible? At least then Ricardo would have something tangible to…and Danny could mourn and then move on with his life. Could take care of. The idea of Edith waiting for him to come home, without ever recognizing that he wouldn’t, came with barbed wire that caught in his throat and dragged downward.

But still. But. Dogs could get new owners. Friends and lovers could find someone new to help heal the wounds. Move on to something better and only hurt when someone else brushed over whatever dark stain Richard would leave behind when the blood was cleared away. It would only hurt on those winter days and only in his knee. Daniel’s hand lightened. Fell away. Words. Saying something that Richard’s mind refused to register despite the eerie emptiness over taking it. He felt cold. In his hands and feet. His throat was dry and the dryness threatened to crack and bleed into his mouth, coating his tongue and staining his teeth and

“Do you want me to move her?” Daniel repeated loudly, slow and just a little impatient. Not directed at him. The Rat King was focused on the rapidly approaching fighting outside, allowing Richard a moment or two to remember how to speak.

“I don’t know what I want,” thin and reedy, a voice from somewhere dark inside him. The helmet changed the tone, increasing the confident reverb, but Richard knew how it sounded in his heart—scratched and ragged, dripping with ice water fear and hatred. Shivering on the gurney after a. It also wasn’t true. He just wanted this to be over. Couldn’t kill her and couldn’t stop wanting to see her dead. Couldn’t bring himself to look at Daniel.

An increasingly difficult feat once Daniel moved in front of him. His chest blocked the view of Regina completely.

“It wouldn’t make her right,” the words pushed themselves into Richard’s ears and stood on the doorstep of his brain, pounding loudly on the locked door. A few knelt down to shout through the mail slot. It took a great deal of effort to not shout back that he wasn’t home. “She would deserve it, Richard,” the air currents faltered, leaving Daniel’s thoughts spiraling and struggling in the stillness. Beating on, nonetheless. “After everything that she’s done to you. Allowed to happen to you and the people like you? Killing her would not make you a monster,” not advocating for the murder but making it clear. He wouldn’t stop it from happening. No last minute dragging Richard away or shouting about how he shouldn’t compromise that last part of himself. He had never killed before and neither had Richard.

“I want the,” mumbled, dragging their feet and nearly tripping over one another on their way out between his lips. “I want her to be held responsible,” he tried to swallow around the lump forming in his throat and nearly choked. “I–,” he wanted the world to see how evil she was. How disturbed. To see the things she had created and be repulsed. And even as he admitted it to himself, he had to admit it was a fantasy. What he could have was suffering. He could make her live each and every day in agony and the knowledge that he had done it to her. That she had been put into a place of torment by her own. Richard almost had to take a step back, smacked in the face by the surge of anger from Daniel’s mind.

“Do you want her to have a chance to defend herself?” Nausea clawed its way up and threatened to twist his throat into knots again. Richard swallowed hard against the need to vomit.

“No,” half a whisper, distorted by the modulator. Half terrible growl. Daniel visibly shuddered at the sound but his mind kicked away the fear of it.

“Do you want people to be inspired by the things she did? To agree with her and side against you? Because those people exist Richie, and I know you know that. We both know there are people who will see what she’s done and say to themselves that they could do it better. Smarter. Who want to learn what her work can teach them,” voice clear but cracking at the edges. “People who are going to look at the man that I love and agree with her that you’re not a person,” pain slipping through where the cracks were wide enough. Fear and anger and Daniel floating forward to put his hands on either side of the helmet, forehead touching the face plate and eyes sliding shut. “You didn’t deserve what she did to you. And you don’t deserve what will happen if,” voice trailing into silence. The gust was gone, leaving behind only broken tree branches and the taste of bile in Richard’s mouth.

If.

If he didn’t do something now. Left unspoken. Danny pulled in a breath with a sound that threatened to break Richard’s heart.

“Killing her won’t fix me,” without power or heat to it. Needing to get the words out of his mouth in any case. There was no fixing something like him. He might be able to mend. With time and patience and no small amount of blunt force super glue. To be repaired to some state of functionality, so long as the given definition of function was loose. Daniel didn’t dignify that with a response. He wasn’t so naïve as to think that it could. Or would. And both of them knew he wasn’t suggesting it. “And it won’t erase the things that she’s done,”

“No. It won’t.” an easy agreement. And the thoughts spinning through Daniel’s mind added on: but it might stop her from making them worse. “You told me once,” a darker cloud began obscuring some of Daniel’s thoughts. Easy enough to break through if Richard had had the drive to. He didn’t. “That if you wanted to, you could reach into someone’s mind and,” a hard pause and Daniel pulled his head back and way from the helmet, eyes opening to stare hard into the blank visor. “And damage them.” Not a question. Not asking for confirmation to the theory that Richard suddenly had access to. “I don’t know if it would be better than just ending her,” Daniel admitted with no small amount of hesitation.

It wouldn’t be better. For a person like Regina, losing control of her mind would be a fate worse than death.

Daniel’s hands left the helmet and fell back onto his shoulders. Richard could feel the internal conflict. Felt it echoed in the hollow valleys and canyons in his own chest. There was a crash outside; judging from the volume barely a block away. Outside, Boris was getting anxious.

“Do you want me move her?” Daniel repeated. Richard felt himself nodding. Always needed more time and never got nearly enough. It would have to be enough.


End file.
